About Paolo Gerbaudo

Paolo Gerbaudo is currently a lecturer in digital culture and society at King's College London, and a freelance journalist.
He was the UK correspondent of the Italian daily newspaper il manifesto and is writing a book for Pluto on protest in Arab and European countries. His latest book, Tweets and the Streets, was published by Pluto press in October, 2012.

The rise of new left leaders such as Alexis Tsipras in Greece and Pablo Iglesias in Spain reflects a new desire for leadership and political representation at odds with the neoanarchist culture that has for long dominated the radical left and influenced the movements of 2011.

In current protest culture the estranged ideologies of
anarchism and progressive populism are coming together around a critique of the
neoliberal “corporate
state”
and a new imaginary of mass insurgency.

Amidst
the ruins of the global economic crisis, the rise of aggregation as the master
frame of online interactions, and the adoption of liking as a means to
subscribe to collective identities, points to the emergence of a new culture of
collectivity which we should welcome and embrace.

While the anti-globalisation movement and before it
the new social movements tended to cast themselves as minorities, the wave of
Occupy or “take the square” movements have made a crucial point of wanting to
be the majority of the people, as most evidently manifested in Occupiers’ claim
to being the 99%.

The
political culture that supported global and European civil society activism in
the1999-2007
period - challenging neoliberal economic and financial power in the form of governments,
EU and global institutions – has appeared irrelevant at the very moment when it
could have emerged as a credible alternative to the crisis of European
economies and politics. A brief chronology and typology of European resistance so far.